Dark Horses

Chapter 1

Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. All works herein Copyright © 2020 by their respective authors. Cover design Copyright © 2020 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. 

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this book is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

SINGULARITY FOR HIRE

by James C. Glass

Academic life for Melvin Funovits had abruptly disintegrated into brainless routine with the arrival of Dean Harrison Ludlow, a former History professor who knew little, if anything, about physics. Ludlow had declared research to be a useless activity at a small, private and expensive university, and everyone’s teaching load had gone up by fifty percent overnight. The major in physics had been dropped, the faculty decreased to two people to provide service courses for rich engineering students whose fathers had lucrative jobs waiting for them. They were expected to graduate, and learning standards were tailored for that goal. Problems were solved in class for later regurgitation on generously graded exams, without any knowledge depth in the subject matter.

Melvin wanted desperately to leave, but could not. He’d only published one paper since his thesis, and had miraculously received tenure for it. He was not a good teacher, was known for putting students to sleep in class. His sanity was maintained by his research project hidden in one corner of the department shop used for construction and repair of equipment for student laboratories and demonstrations, and he worked there evenings and weekends.

And it was there, one evening, when he first produced the worm-hole.

It was certainly some kind of singularity. He had first observed the thing while working with plasma confinement. A tube was filled with hot plasma confined by strong, twisting magnetic fields perturbed strongly by an electromagnetic wave from a directional antenna a meter outside the tube. There was a popping sound, and suddenly the tube was empty and a big ball of plasma was hovering in the air next to the antenna and Melvin Funovits was stumbling over a chair to get away from it. The plasma ball rose and exploded against the ceiling with a loud whoosh, and when he recovered from the shock Melvin found the gas cylinders feeding the plasma tube sucked dry. Somehow, everything in the tube had been transferred directly to a point near the directional antenna.

He tried it again, and the phenomena was repeatable, the glow inside the tube disappearing as a plasma ball crackled into existence near the antenna.

Direct transport of matter was teleportation, a dream out of science fiction. He could have fame, wealth and world travel. He could form his own company and staff it with dedicated scientists, find a good research director and spend a lot of time living and traveling in Europe. Switzerland was nice. But when he thought for a moment, he knew that in the industrial world there wouldn’t be much call for the teleportation of hot plasmas. He would have to do it with solids.

Melvin Funovits rebuilt his machine. The plasma tube was now gone. In its place was a shallow rectangular box open at the top and made out of iron. An identical box was fixed just below the directional antenna. He picked up a twisted blob of colorful glass and looked at it closely after his first experiment the previous evening. He had successfully transported it, sort of. It had been a child’s marble.

It wasn’t a marble anymore, and Switzerland seemed far away.

He would proceed by trial and error. The field configuration was complex, and he wasn’t equipped to map it accurately. There should be size and even shape effects, and the size of the singularity was an unknown. He worked the rest of late afternoon and far into the evenings with a series of objects: a child’s wooden block, lead bricks of various sizes, and a tiny ball bearing. All were transported, and all were horribly distorted by the process. The distortion was least for the ball bearing, so the entrance to the worm-hole, or whatever it was, seemed to be quite small, but not microscopic. Any large object sucked into it was spewed out as a mangled blob at the other end. His dreams of fame and fortune were fading. Feeling frustrated, yet curious, he tossed a wilted flower into the box and turned on full power to the antenna. A putrid stench suddenly filled the room, and the slimy mess he saw in the box by the antenna disgusted him. He turned the machine off, then walked in light fog back to his apartment in darkness, feeling quite depressed.

Melvin was comforted by his dreams. He dreamed of a mountain chalet in Switzerland. His chalet was perched on a hillside overlooking a small village of houses with orange roofs, surrounded by jagged snow topped mountains reaching up to a clean, blue sky free of smoke and exhaust fumes.

In the evenings he would entertain lady-friends in his little home; perhaps he would choose one for his wife. Now that he was wealthy, a woman might overlook his physical appearance and personality in favor of a comfortable material life. He was a quiet, gentle sort of man, basically a good person, and he deserved a life of more than frustration and loneliness, a life full of stimulus and creativity.

In his dream, Melvin realized he was angry, and now willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted. His hope rested on one positive aspect of his personality.

He was a very persistent person.

The experiments continued during evenings, weekends, even short breaks between a myriad of classes filled with robotic students writing down problem solutions and memorizing them. Melvin didn’t care anymore. He gave them what they wanted, what they needed. He would never again derive an equation for them.

At first the size of the singularity seemed to be the only problem. A single piece of buckshot two millimeters in diameter transported without change in size or shape, but even two pieces together ended up an irregular blob of lead at the receiving end of the machine. The singularity size was something just over two millimeters, hardly a practical size. Perhaps he could increase it by using move power and a larger antenna. But the power supply was inadequate and he would have to build a new one.

Transport was only one way towards the antenna, and on a Saturday night Melvin’s hopes for a better life rose again, briefly. An object placed at the receiving end was fused with the transmitted object, without change in shape or size. Only the density changed. A small, wooden block became a small lead block containing twisted pieces of wood when a similar-sized lead block was transmitted.  He tried it with identical lead blocks, and the normal density of lead was doubled. The crystal structure couldn’t be the same, he thought. Transported atoms were probably packed interstitially at the receiving end, and the result was a material that would defy all metallurgical processes.

So what good was super-dense lead if you couldn’t fabricate anything with it? Shielding? He doubted that. Shielding was straight forward enough with normal lead. Radioactive waste disposal? Maybe, but there were easier ways to do that. The results were the same with copper and steel. Industry wanted lighter, stronger, more easily worked metals, definitely not the kinds of things he was producing.

Over a weekend, and well into a Monday of classes, he tried to make alloys, transmitting one metal into another. The task consumed him totally. In his obsession, time meant nothing, and he was freed from class preparations, lectures, grading, and the mindless questions he had answered a thousand times.

He failed again. The metals would not mix together in a uniform way. He cut open sample after sample to find globs and veins of one metal in the other. Certainly not an alloy. He tried another pair of metals, oblivious of the classes he was missing, not seeing the classrooms filled with waiting students, and Dean Harrison Ludlow prowling the falls furiously in search of a professor who had missed three classes that morning.

Melvin cut open the little block of steel, saw the veins of tungsten in it and felt tears welling up in his eyes. It was no use. The machine had no practical applications and he was stuck fast in his mindless environment forever. A tiny part of him retained hope; he searched the room for something else to try in the machine. Through a mist of tears he saw two blocks of marble holding up a row of books on a shelf. Amorphous material. Perhaps that would give him something. He put one block in the receiving box, and was positioning the other at the transmitting end of the machine when his laboratory door suddenly flew open and Dean Harrison Ludlow was screaming at him.

“Funovits, this is the end! What the hell are you doing down here? There are a hundred students upstairs right now, milling around in a classroom, waiting for one of your brilliant lectures and you’re down here tinkering!”

Melvin jumped away from the machine, frightened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that—“

“—You don’t realize anything! Your only reason for existence here is teaching; you’re not even supposed to be doing research!” Dean Ludlow, red-faced, waved an arm around the room and shouted, “Where did you get all this stuff? Steal it?”

Melvin pressed his lips tightly together, fear changing rapidly into something else. He backed up against the power supply of the machine.

“Of course you won’t answer,” thundered the Dean. “This is all stolen equipment here, equipment to be used only for teaching.” He stalked over to the machine, slapped one hand on it, smiling as Melvin glared back at him.

“No matter,” said Ludlow, still smiling. “I don’t even need theft charges; missing your classes is quite enough for dismissal. I will be very glad to get rid of you, Funovits, you and your terrible teaching. The students will probably thank me.” He grabbed one edge of the box at the machine’s transmitting end, pulled at it and leaned over to look in it when Melvin Funovits spoke very softly to him.

“Don’t touch anything,” said Melvin. Behind his back, he felt the hum of the power supply. It was on standby, set for full power.

“Oh really,” said the Dean, and he reached with one hand towards the block of marble in the box. “I’ll do more than touch, Funovits. I’m going to take this apparatus apart, and you’ll help me do it, and then you’re going to get out of here, and out of my life.” His hand grasped the marble.

Melvin Funovits threw the power switch. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Oh,” said Dean Ludlow.

There was a crackling sound and a blast of heat; the image of Dean Harrison Ludlow was frozen in space and time, shimmering and then fading to nothingness. A putrid stench filled the room and Melvin remembered the flower. He turned away, swallowing hard to suppress an urge to retch, and then the terrible odor was gone with the heat and the room was suddenly cool. When he turned off the power supply, silence swallowed him and he stood for a long while, listening to the pounding of his heart and wondering about what he had done. Where the Dean had stood was nothing. He hesitated, then walked over to the receiving box of the machine and looked inside it, wincing at what he saw.

The block of marble was still there, same size, same shape, only the color had changed. It glistened black and purple, with streaks of yellow, green and red. Lots of red. When Melvin leaned close he breathed in a bad odor again, and his stomach moved with revulsion. He put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and touched the block, feeling the hardness of it, pushing on it. The block was heavy. How much had the Dean weighed? A hundred and eighty? Maybe more. All of it was there, in a block of marble. The enormity of his deed suddenly struck him.

He had murdered Dean Harrison Ludlow in cold blood. Or had it been an accident? Ludlow had been fooling with the machine and it had suddenly started up, and the man was gone. It was a most unfortunate accident. Still, who would believe him? Doctor, please tell the court about this block. Certainly, your honor. The block has type O blood, same type as that of the missing person. Otherwise, all I can say is it is a dense mixture of smelly organic matter and marble with some spectacular colors, and it would make an interesting bookend if it weren’t so heavy. The weight is really most unusual.

He would have to dispose of the block. He could push hard enough to tilt it up on one edge. The hydraulic lift in the laboratory did the rest. He lowered the block towards the floor, placed it on a hand truck and moved the block around the room. He locked the door, turned out the lights and sat in darkness, thinking. His story was clear. He had been ill that day, had called the Dean at his home that morning to tell him he wouldn’t be able to meet his classes, and hadn’t seen the man since. No, the man hadn’t sounded depressed or unusual in any way.

A new thought popped into his mind about the use of the machine. It surprised him with its practicality. And for a while he sat in darkness, developing a new idea and waiting for night to fall.

The main steam pipe was in place and workmen had begun that day to refill the small chasm that ran through the center of campus. Shortly after the sun had set, and just before students had finished their evening meal, Professor Melvin Funovits pushed a creaking hand truck out of the physics building and over to a point of the excavation where filling operations had ceased for the day. He tipped the truck forward. A heavy load dropped into the pit and buried itself deeply in the soft, new earth below. He pushed the hand truck back to the physics building with ease, striding along briskly. In the quiet of his laboratory, his new idea had developed quickly, and he had found a way out. He would sell his invention to a particular business group, but making contact with that group was going to be complex and perhaps dangerous to accomplish.

––––––––